Drifting at the Shallow End

The papaya sat in the bowl, looking obscene with its bright orange flesh and black seeds, like some tropical organ on display. Elena had sliced it herself — she did everything herself now, ever since the housekeeper quit, though she'd never admit the help was gone. Another thing that quietly dissolved during the divorce.

"Try it," she said, and Jamie took a piece, chewing mechanically. It was sweet and cloying and nothing like what she needed right now.

They were at Elena's pool — not really a pool so much as a submerged statement about resilience. Elena had insisted on putting it in after Tom left. A symbol of something. Jamie had never asked what exactly.

Three teenagers were swimming in the deep end, Elena's daughter and her friends, their laughter carrying across the water in bursts that seemed deliberately performative. They didn't know. They didn't know that their mothers had once been those girls, once had that same unselfconscious certainty that the world was arranged for their pleasure, that friendship was something solid and permanent.

Jamie's iPhone buzzed against her thigh. She didn't check it. She'd been checking it all morning — emails from the vice principal about Noah's grades, texts from David that she'd left on read, notifications that felt like accusations. She was hollowed out by the maintaining of things.

"You okay?" Elena asked. They were 43 now. They'd been friends since seventh grade, which meant they knew each other's tells, the particular way silence could be heavy or light or something in between.

"Just tired," Jamie said. "You know how it is."

"I do," Elena said, and something in her voice — adult and pragmatic and devoid of the dramatics that had defined their twenties — made Jamie want to weep. They'd both gotten exactly what they'd wanted, hadn't they? The marriages, the children, the houses with pools. The small papaya satisfactions. And now they drifted in the shallow end of their own lives, watching the next generation swim toward something they could no longer remember how to want.

"Let's go in," Elena said, standing up in her beautiful swimsuit that hid nothing and everything. "I have wine."

"Yes," Jamie said. "Thank you."

The iPhone buzzed again. Neither of them moved.